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MojoKid writes "Intel took the wraps off a new Core 2 Duo desktop chip today, dubbed the E6750. Though this chip shares the same basic clock speed as the Core 2 Duo E6700 at 2.66GHz, this new processor also runs on a faster 1,333MHz Front Side Bus. The new chip's additional bus bandwidth affords it up to a 5% performance advantage over standard 1066MHz FSB-based Core 2 chips. However, what's perhaps more promising is this new chip's
overclocking head-room of up to 3.92GH and beyond on standard air cooling."

Why not just sell them rated at a higher clock speed? It would be funny to think they made a fast chip and purposefully rated it at a lower speed to grab some of the extra hobbiest market while simultaneously cutting down on support calls from overclockers who cause system instability by making the overclockers think they are overclocking.:)

overclockability. I believe those chips sent out for review are cherry picked by intel. Most of the reviews for the Core 2 Duo chips last year said the lower end chips could easily be overclocked to 3.5ghz+. That ended up not being the norm. I think something around 3ghz is pretty standard.

Do people still overclock? It is such a focus on this in online hardware reviews, but none of the people I know still do it, even the gamers. Power consumption, heat and noise is much more important to them. Low sample number to draw any significant conclusions from, I know, but still... Perhaps the market has moved on a bit?

You're right, the hardware reviewers are getting out of date with their metrics.

Overclocking a modern CPU gets you mostly nothing nowadays. Gamers can still be found overclocking their *graphics cards*, but overclocking their Core 2 Duo's wouldn't really change anything for them (and I'm sure we'll reach a point where messing with your graphics card will be just as unnecessary as it is today with CPU-s, just this industry is younger than generic cpu).

I mean, on laptops one of the features is dynamically underclocking the CPU for less power usage. It's the kind of market we're in.

Multi-cores are lucrative area for servers, where no CPU amount is enough, and less so for desktops.

No wonder the companies are concentrating on features such as power usage: there's basically nothing else they can impress us with (and low power usage allows smaller more mobile devices with longer battery life etc.).

Actually, the reason why overclocking the processor will do squat for a gamer's performance is because the bottleneck is on the graphics card. The day the graphics industry matures enough to be on par with the general purpose processor industry will not mean you won't get anything from overclocking the graphics card. Rather, it'll mean that you'll gain the most performance by overclocking both GPU and CPU (because neither is holding the other back). Of course, the question is "do you really need the extra performance?" -- I seriously doubt that games will hit a cap on the power they can harness from your box anytime soon. There's always higher res textures, more detailed models, more elaborate particle systems, etc to be had, especially if the support for physics cards doesn't really become a trend and nVidia/AMD manage to make the GPGPU thing happen.